The entries in what has come to be known as Pascal's Triangle make diverse appearances in the study of mathematics and statistics. On the right is an image from Murai Chuzen's Sampo Doshi-mon (1781, Japan) of Pascal's Triangle, together with instructions on how to construct it. The first known descriptions of the Triangle come from China and Persia.

The entries in the n^th row of Pascal's Triangle can be used to calculate the values of a binomial distribution with n trials. A normal distribution curve can be expressed as a limit of binomial distributions.